This book takes a new look at occupied and liberated France through the dual prism of race, specifically Jewishness, and gender - core components of Vichy ideology. The imagining of liberation and the potential post-Vichy state, lay at the heart of resistance strategy. Their transformation into policy at liberation forms the basis of an enquiry that reveals a society which, while split deeply at the political level, found considerable agreement over questions of race, the family and gender. This is explained through a new analysis of republican assimilation which insists that gender was as important a factor as nationality or ethnicity. A new concept of the 'long liberation' provides a framework for understanding the continuing influence of the liberation in post-war France, where scientific planning came to the fore, but whose exponents were profoundly imbued with reductive beliefs about Jews and women that were familiar during Vichy.

In France in an Era of Global War, scholars re-examine experiences of French politics, occupation, empire and entanglements with the Anglophone world between 1914 and 1945. In doing so, they question the long-standing myths and assumptions which continue to surround this period, and offer new avenues of enquiry.

The latest revision of what is the best available guide to modern French politics.

Workers' Participation in Post-Liberation France is a vivid portrait of French labor's failure to achieve greater industrial democracy. Drawing on original archival research, Adam Steinhouse recasts the traditional view of this critical period of French history, demonstrating the fundamental importance of the immediate post-liberation period in determining the future course of industrial relations in France. He brings to life the labor disputes of the 1940s, charting the interplay between industry and politicians that dealt a crushing blow to organized labor's demands for political change. Steinhouse captures the rise of state intervention in the economy and plots the growth of French employers' organized intransigence in the face of workers' collective action; which culminated in a series of actions effectively marginalizing labor's voice in the economic boom of the early 1950s. Steinhouse's impressive scholarship provides an excellent case study of the French state and its efforts to balance growing worker demands for representation with the imperatives of social peace and prosperity. This book makes a significant contribution to modern French political history and the development of modern industrial relations.

Bringing together key international scholars, Vichy, Resistance, Liberation: New Perspectives on Wartime France offers original insight into this critical period of modern France. It shifts the focus away from straightforward political history to reflect the current interest in socio-cultural aspects of the Second World War and breaks down traditional chronological barriers.In seeking to understand war from a social perspective, the contributors focus on individuals and communities. Wars are moments which forever alter the emphasis of social expression. Rumours emerge as a major aspect of daily life. Wars are also periods offering new possibilities to individuals. Several contributors explore the lives of previously little known individuals in Vichy France Paulette Bernge, Daniel Gurin, Georges Mauco, Franois Perroux. Other contributors emphasize some of the forgotten actors of the period, most notably the anarchists. Other contributors uncover new information about womens experience in Vichy France.Vichy, Resistance, Liberation moves away from the trend of synthesis history and presents path-breaking research and new trajectories of interest in the field. The collection pays tribute to the work of H.R. Kedward, the world-renowned specialist on Occupied France.

A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

In the decades after World War II, French ideas about gender and family life underwent dramatic changes, laying the groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. This book offers a broad view of changing lives and ideas about love, courtship, marriage, giving birth, parenting, childhood, and adolescence in France from the Vichy regime to the sexual revolution of 1960s.

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize 2023 A Telegraph Book of the Year A Times, Spectator and Prospect Book of the Year One of the great contemporary historians of France on one of the most controversial periods of twentieth-century French history Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain - the great French hero of the First World War - shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting, Pétain told the French people that he was 'entering down the road of collaboration'. He ended with the words: 'This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.' Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judgement - if not yet the judgement of History - arrived. Pétain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944. Julian Jackson uses Pétain's three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history - the defeat of 1940, the signing of the armistice and Vichy's policy of collaboration - what the main prosecutor Mornet called 'four years to erase from our history'. As head of the Vichy regime in the Second, Pétain became one of France's most notorious public figures, and the lightening-rod for collective guilt and retribution immediately after the Second World War. In France on Trial Jackson blends politics and personal drama to explore how different national factions sought to try to claim the past, or establish their interpretation of it, as a way of claiming the present and future.

Between 1942 and 1944 the Germans sealed and completely emptied at least 38,000 Parisian apartments. The majority of the furnishings and other household items came from 'abandoned' Jewish apartments and were shipped to Germany. After the war, Holocaust survivors returned to Paris to discover their homes completely stripped of all personal possessions or occupied by new inhabitants. In 1945, the French provisional government established a Restitution Service to facilitate the return of goods to wartime looting victims. Though time-consuming, difficult, and often futile, thousands of people took part in these early restitution efforts. Stealing Home demonstrates that attempts to reclaim one's furnishings and personal possessions were key in efforts to rebuild Jewish political and social inclusion in the war's wake. Far from remaining silent, Jewish survivors sought recognition of their losses, played an active role in politics, and turned to both the government and each other for aid. Drawing on memoirs, oral histories, restitution claims, social workers' reports, newspapers, and government documents, Stealing Home provides a social history of the period that focuses on Jewish survivors' everyday lives during the lengthy process of restoring citizenship and property rights. It examines social rebirth through the prism of restitution and argues that the home was critical in shaping the postwar relationship between Jews and the state, and in the successes and failures associated with rebuilding Jewish lives in France after the Holocaust.